Hey all,

Edits in bold

I am working on retooling some of the rules that don't really fit into my vision of the 40k universe. As this is just based on my personal opinion and as a means to rebalance the game more to my taste you can take it with a grain of salt.

The biggest issues that I’ve been struggling to balance have been the weapons. There are many topics regarding this so I don't think I need to go into too much detail. I will, however, explain my changes in each instance so that it does not seem completely arbitrary. Some of the changes are mechanics fixes and some are what I consider to be common sense changes (my opinion of course ).

The first change is a fairly dramatic one as it relates to the bolter. It is clear to me that a weapon that is put in the players hand at the very beginning of the game should not outperform high cost specialized weapons in most cases. Some people may argue that on a shot per shot basis the plasma gun outperforms the bolter and they would be right some of the time. If, however, you take into account specialized rounds like the kraken variant and full auto that difference becomes quite absurd.

The bolter changes are as follows:
Bolter (Godwyn): Range 100M Damage 1D10+8 Penetration 4 Type (X) Special attribute Tearing

While this is an obviously significant decrease in potential damage output it does immediately make other weapons more viable. As for the fairly limited affect the weapon has against hard targets like a Space Marine, I feel this is true to the cannon as it has been stated that the Astartes power armour was designed to be able to take a bolter round at 20 feet. That said, with just 5 requisition the bolter can still do a decent job of putting even a Space Marine down. All bolter weapon types are similarly reduced in damage with the Heavy bolter having range 150M 1D10+12 penetration 5.

I have added the felling quality to all plasma weapons as it makes them even more effective against high value targets and makes allot of sense when you think about a ball of condensed hydrogen molecules that are superheated to over 6000 degrees Celsius hitting a man’s flesh. I may add this property to melta weapons as well but I haven't done the math for it. The significantly reduced range and limited rate of fire seem like significant enough penalties in and of themselves anyway. I have also house ruled the felling property eliminates toughness when there is no unnatural trait.

I am going to go with critical rules that I read on the forum somewhere but I can't honestly remember who first stated them so I apologize for that. The rule is as follows: Upon rolling a righteous fury, instead of rolling damage again, the player roles 1D5 on the relevant critical table and reduces that number by the unnatural toughness of the enemy. The number cannot be reduced to less than 1. This is also affected by the felling special quality which makes critical with the felling property more effective on crit roles if less certain of getting them due to the lack of tearing.

The RAW wrist and shoulder mounting seems to be a cut and paste job from the DH rule book because it specifies that it is only effective with pistol type weapons. This makes the upgrade extremely situational in its use not to mention the fact that there are numerous representations that counter that in the cannon. With that in mind I will allow basic weapon types to use the attachment unless it seems ridiculous.

A new talent for melee specialists that replicates the effects of the gunslinger talent is in order. I don't see any reason why the melee classes should be penalized when the ranged classes are not. Something like Blademaster or Maybe Kensai ?

DoS for Melee: degrees of success on melee attacks IN ADDITION TO the initial attack confirmation may be used to replace a low roll on one D10 roll for that attacks damage calculation. See example below

Librarian psychic abilities are restricted far too much in with regards to chapters, I feel as though the player should be able to choose the chapter he/she wishes to role play without being pigeon holed into playing a character mechanically a certain way. As an attempt to homogenize the class into something more flexible for role-playing purposes I will make most psychic abilities fall under the general abilities list and restrict only the most iconic chapter abilities like blood boil. I may simply make the chapter psychic abilities available to all librarians with an increased cost so that librarians of the chapter that the ability comes from will still benefit from cheaper experience costs. A librarian may only take abilities from another chapter list up to rank 3 .More librarian changes to follow

Artificer armour found in the DW core rulebook does not, in my opinion, fit the fluff of the setting. I believe that artificer armour is tremendously effective because it is manufactured with the specific needs of the space marine in mind. Each of the classes that pay for the exalted artificer armour should get what they pay for. A good example of an advantage that I refer to would be a psychic hood built into the helmet of the Armour of master quality. Another example would be advanced targeting optics that would act as preysense and a motion predictor for a Devastator or perhaps a wolf helm that allowed the space wolfs advanced senses to work without hindrance

I have decided to alter the lightning claw and power fist to better represent the specialized nature of each weapon.

Lightning Claw: melee 2D10+3 Pen 8 Type E Special: Tearing, special

Power fist: 2D10* Pen 12 Type E Special: unbalanced, -2 initiative.

The power fist is designed to be devastating to armour so I increased the penetration of the weapon to properly illustrate the difference between it and its other melee counterparts. I also altered the balance because I believe that the unwieldy trait was a holdover from DH and added a penalty to initiative because the weapon is powerful but slow. With the application of the DoS melee rule this weapon is clearly the best choice for destroying truely heavy targets.

No doubt there will be more house rules to come in the future as I have not looked at all the heavy weapons.....

Heavy bolters need more than +1/+1. I'd argue +2-4/+1.

Straight up adding +1d10 to Plasma/Melta has been the pretty well established fix du jour. Felling is too limiting, imo (why is it crap vs normal humans but surprisingly effective vs Astartes?).

I believe N01 proposed that RF => Crit rule (at least that's where I read it first). Works, but most lvl 1-2 crits (anything that you are tracking crits on will have at least T 4+, so the 1d5 roll is redundant) are fairly underwhelming and I'd rather not track Fatigue on something that can probably take about 10 levels of it and will be dead in 2 rounds.

I think forearm mounted bolters or flamers make sense. Stormbolters should be limited to Hero level at least (Fists of Ultramar are a relic for a reason). Plasma and melta...I'd say just no.

Agree on Gunslinger for melee. Blademaster is already the name of the talent allowing you to re-roll a miss.

I disagree on Artificer armor. It's not made to order. It's a masterpiece that's thousands of years old. They should get one roll on the standard armor history chart and a slightly better artificer chart (although, more histories in general would just be better). Or, one roll + one choose.

Regarding Lightning claws, what penetration bonus do you mean? They get a straight damage bonus, not a Pen bonus per DoS. You've also made Power fists obsolete. Without the random damage and fewer damage dice, lightning claws are much better than fists. Yes, they have 4 more pen, but 90% of the time that is not going to matter. And, the claws have +7 damage, so in effect, they are Power fists -1or -2 with Tearing (assuming a Str bonus of 4 or 5, the unnatural multiplier only adds 1 or 2 more damage than the flat +7 would do on a target with >= 12 AP). On anything with less than 12 AP, the claws are better, as they don't have [as much] wasted Pen.

How do you adjudicate the Init penalty? Does simply having a fist penalize your Init? What about if you're shooting that round? Bouncing between roll and roll-2 every round? Unless there is someone at roll -1 (or roll-2 w/ > Ag bonus), that has absolutely no effect.

With your changes to bolters, what else gets tearing and multiple dice besides the claws? I hadn't read that when I wrote the above about claws. Rolling 4d10, best 2 will blow power fists out of the water in all cases.

I suppose you may be right. I am trying to have the weapons excel at what they are supposed to and as far as I recall the power fist is an anti tank/ walker weapon. With that in mind I applied a penetration value that would make sense in that regard. Looking at the tearing rule again does seem to be in order, I was simply trying to make the rules a little easier for my players to follow. As far as I am concerned the weapon should be more effective than a power fist against heavy infantry because that is the whole point of its existance.

With regards to the heavy bolter, that was a mistake. Its supposed to be 1D10+12

I will have to agree to disagree with regards to artificer armour. I understand what your saying but If I was to give ancient artificer armour to a librarian that has been worn for hundreds of years by other librarians and it didn't have a hood built in...?

Horde damage avoidance: The RAW rules for hordes states that damage dealt from hordes cannot be dodged or parried in melee and can only be dodged at range. I understand the fluff and mechanic reasons behind this, but it does make it very difficult to include non-Astartes characters with the horde rules as they stand. It also marginalizes the dodge/parry skills and makes melee combat at higher levels even less effective than ranged combat. So I propose this: when being attacked at range a character may make a dodge attempt, this attempt will not negate all the fire that is being focused at the player but reduce damage by a number equal to the degrees of success. The number value will be 2 points per DoS without power armour and 1 point in power armour. A character may make as many dodge attempts as would normally be allowed but never more than one per attack. With a shield: A parry attempt may be made to reduce ranged damage with a shield or a weapon with the relevant talents. With a combat shield or weapon the ranged damage may be reduced by 1 point per DoS. A storm shield may reduce damage by 2 points per DoS. A character may make as many parry attempts as would normally be allowed but never more than one per attack. Weapons and shields work similarly in melee combat. This also has the added benefit of making the shield a more tactically sound decision as they could use the buff in my opinion.

Good or is there some obvious flaw in my logic?

The general marine traits will be expanded to incorporate things that all marines would be privy to at different costs based on their specialization. For example: melee combat talents that are rank one talents for an assault marines would be available in the general marine talents section at rank 2. The cost of the talent would be increased according to the specialization of the players character to represent the time and challenge of incorporating training outside of their already demanding role.

IE: A tactical marine and a Librarian both want to take the swift attack trait at rank 2. The trait costs the Assault marine 500xp at rank 1 so the tactical marine can buy the talent for 750xp at rank 2 and the Librarian can take the talent for 1000xp at rank 2.

Edits
Changed the bolter damage from 1d10+7 to 1d10+8 so that a space marine would take one wound when hit in the torso with a toughness of 10 on a roll of a 9 with standard ammo.

Added DoS rule from the forums for melee damage. The rule is simply that the lowest dice roll can be changed to a number equal to the DoS on the weapon skill roll to hit.
Example: Space marine rolls a 22 on a WS check to hit with his Power Fist. As the Space marine has 66 WS he has achieved a hit plus 4 degrees of success. The marine then rolls for damage and gets a 2 and a 3. While both rolls are poor, the marine can replace the 2 with a 4 as he succeeded so splendidly on his attack.

I find most of your rules interesting, but you're weakening the bolter too much without proposing a valid replacement. What I've been doing is a pretty simple fix that puts most weapons on a similar level:

Add 1d10 or 6 to the damage of melta and plasma weapons, and the lascannon. Apply DH RF rules. Reduce HB penetration to 5.

Make it so that any armor that hasn't been penetrated by the weapon counts double towards damage reduction.

These simple homerules have so far:

-made tough enemies tougher and much more impervious to bolter fire.

-made hordes less of a danger and more of a annoyance to players. In the first game I ran, a 30 mag. tau warriors horde one-shot one of my players in cover behind a tree . Because when you shoot 4 bursts of 4 shots that do 4d10+2 pen.4 at BS 65 (10 short range, 20 full auto), that 24 damage reduction (8 armor, 8 toughness and 8 tree) is actually pretty weak.

-made plasma and melta weapons at the very least efficient secondary weapons.

-made special ammunition that much more necessary to take down master enemies with a bolter.

I'm also thinking of removing the +20 bonus for full auto and affecting it to single shot, because it's actually more realistic. And makes the HB a little weaker (if I do, I think I'll put its pen. back at 6 though).

Nice stuff though, I think I'll steal your melee horde damage mitigation rules.

K0balt said:

I understand your trepidation towards the bolters reduction in damage. I am, however, concerned with not only bringing the current weaponry into balance but also balancing the weaponry so that it is even remotely viable to combine this game with the other core character classes from the DH and Rogue Trader books. If I were to simply add a D10 to the damage output of all the weapons aside from the bolter I would have no chance of accomplishing that as far as I can see it. If you can figure out a work around for that issue I would love some further input.

I thank you for the commitment you are giving into the creation of your House rules, but I wish you would create individual post for the different areas. I know that for me it would allow me to better compare and contrast between the book, your changes and my suggestions.

40k Junkie said:

I'm not sure exactly what your asking of me here. Did you want me to seperate all of my house rules into seperate posts?